less Lochinvar was present. Bets had been made that if he stayed away or passed the word, no one would attend at all. Maurier was still regarded— Well, imagine for yourself a situation like that: a tradition of ease unassailable and unshakable gone to pieces right under you, and out of the wreckage rising a man who once held your stirrup while you mounted. . . . Thirty years is barely the adolescence of bitterness, you know.
“I’d like to have seen her, coming out of the church afterward. They would have had a canopy leading from the door to the carriage: there must have been a canopy, and flowers, heavy ones—Lochinvar would have sent gardenias; and she, decked out in all the pagan trappings of innocence and her beautiful secret face beside that cold, violent man, graying now, but you have remarked how it takes the harlequinade of aristocracy to really reveal peasant blood, haven’t you? And her Lochinvar to wish her godspeed, watching her ankles as she got into the carriage.
“They never had any children. Maurier may have been too old; she herself may have been barren. Often that type is. But I don’t think so. I believe . . . But who knows? I don’t. Anyway, that explains her, to me. At first you think it’s just silliness, lack of occupation—a tub of washing, to be exact. But I see something thwarted back of it all, something stifled, yet which won’t quite die.”
“A virgin,” Fairchild said immediately. “That’s what it is, exactly. Fooling with sex, kind of dabbing at it, like a kitten at a ball of string. She missed something: her body told her so, insisted, forced her to try to remedy it and fill the vacuum. But now her body is old; it no longer remembers that it missed anything, and all she has left is a habit, the ghost of a need to rectify something the lack of which her body has long since forgotten about.”
